Experimental study of pedestrian flow through right-angled corridor: uni- and bidirectional scenarios

Abstract

Corners can be commonly observed in most building facilities.However, pedestrians' turning behavior at the corners, especially in collective movements, is rarely studied and not fully understood. To investigate the eects of such configuration on pedestrian flow, both uni-and bidirectional experiments were conducted in a right-angled corridor. From the fundamental diagram, it is found that pedestrians in our experiments are less sensitive to high-density situations and the velocity at high densities tends to be larger than observed values in former studies. Besides, in our experiments, no noticeable dierence is observed between the fundamental diagrams in uni-and bidirectional scenarios for densities below 2 ped m −2 . According to the density profile, pedestrians in unidirectional turning movements tend to seek the shortest path, whereas their followed path is more influenced by the detour behavior against encounters when it comes to bidirectional scenarios. Besides, due to the collision avoidance behavior and lane formation phenomenon in bidirectional scenarios, the highest

Uni- and bidirectional pedestrian flows through zigzag corridor in a tourism area: a field study

“…The velocity is mainly below 0.6 m/s, while the maximum velocity is about 1.8 m/s at the right-angled corner that is close to the entrance. However, in the controlled experiment performed by Ye et al (2019), the data have significant differences with the observational experiment. The velocity in Ye et al (2019) is much higher than that in our experiment in the whole density regime.…”

“…Second, the environment around the experiment scenarios should not be neglected. The experiment scenarios in Ye et al (2019) were set up by the organizers and conducted in the university, while in our study the observational experiments were carried out in tourist attraction area. Therefore, the pedestrians in our study would draw their attention to the architectures around the Yuyuan business district, which leads to lower velocity even though the density was low.…”

“…However, in the controlled experiment performed by Ye et al (2019), the data have significant differences with the observational experiment. The velocity in Ye et al (2019) is much higher than that in our experiment in the whole density regime. The scenery and human behavior have a significant effect on the pedestrians' movement in the observational experiment, which results in lower velocity and specific flow.…”

“…Interestingly, the velocity of the observational experiment almost keeps stable, namely, about 0.2 m/s at all densities, which differs from that of Ye et al's ( 2019) study. Because the experiments that conducted in Ye et al (2019) were well controlled by the organizers and the pedestrians walked by listening to the instructions, that is, the participants walked from the waiting area directly to the destination with the weaker influence of environment (they just focus on walking in controlled experiments), higher velocity and specific flow can be obtained. As for the observational experiment, two significant points should be emphasized here.…”

“…First, it should be noted that the composition of pedestrians may make a great difference in the experiments. For example, the participants in the controlled experiment (Ye et al, 2019) were homogeneous university students, who are more active than the heterogeneous pedestrians in the observational experiment, so they are more likely to walk faster to reach at the destination. Second, the environment around the experiment scenarios should not be neglected.…”